Personally Intel should have gone with higher uncore clocks even if it meant 5-10w higher TDP it would have made it a better cpu over all but for those who have more cash than common sense or have time sensitive work this is the obvious best option.

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2.

Ha, I disagree.
The increase in cores and clock make this a nice upgrade.
Enough to last till next year.
Everyday usage is needed to really notice the difference.
So this review is understandable...but incorrect.

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Those LinX GFlops numbers look awfully low - are you sure the system is "stable"? The 980x in the review gets about 61 Glops at 4.1GHz. That's wayyy off the max theoretical of 4.1 x 4 x 6 = 98 Glops.

In contrast, at 4.2GHz my 980x consistently achieves about 90-92 Gflops using the popular "Intel Burn Test" version of Linpack, and using intel's own batchfile driven Linpack. Reasonably close to the max theoretical of 4.2 x 4 x 6 = 101 Gflops.

I have noticed my system showing unpredictable and low Gflop figures (anywhere between 50-something to 80-something Gflops) when something is unstable (yet stable enough for Linpack to finish 10 or 20 runs of a large problem size) and the CPU voltages are insufficient. I wonder if this is some error correction mechanism in the QPI interface which "thottles" the lanes when it detects errors. With enough voltage the Gflop numbers stabilize.

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6.

Ok, so there's still a problem. Everywhere I look they say that the L3 cache associativity is still 16. The problem with that is that 12MB / (64Bytes * 16) = 12288 which is not a power of 2. The associativity must be either 12 or 24. Does any one know which it is?